


Who Wants To Live Forever?

by LongLiveRogers



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Originally Posted on Tumblr, the unfortunate side effects of immortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:21:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29932662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LongLiveRogers/pseuds/LongLiveRogers
Summary: When Anathema finally goes, it has been fifty-three years since the apocalypse didn’t happen.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Who Wants To Live Forever?

**Author's Note:**

> For Eli, and his thoughts about a graveyard in the rain.

When Anathema finally goes, it has been fifty-three years since the apocalypse didn’t happen.  
They don’t show at the funeral, not close enough for anyone to see them. Not on the consecrated ground of the chapel. But after...after the Last Witch in England has been put in the ground, after the last mourners (Adam and his wise brown eyes, Newt and his quietly hunched shoulders, Dog and his slow, ambling walk by his master’s side) have left the freshly turned earth and a sprig of blue aster behind, they remain.  
They don’t speak on the walk up the gravel path, between rows and rows of crumbling gravestones, the odd crypt overgrown with lichen and ivy.  
By no miracle of theirs, the graveyard is empty—just them, and the steadily falling rain. When they finally reach her grave,

ANATHEMA DEVICE  
BELOVED WITCH  
JUST AS BLIND AS THE REST OF US

Aziraphale takes Crowley’s hand, offering a comfort he knows he won’t ask for. He receives a too-tight squeeze in response. They’re there as it starts to storm, miraculously dry, and they remain when it subsides to a drizzle, and if Aziraphale lets his tears dampen Crowley’s shoulder, if Crowley’s breath hitches—neither of them mentions it.  
They’ve done this before—stood vigil for dozens of humans, seen them bright-eyed and full of fire, only for reality to catch up, cold and still as stone. Each of them already claimed for Upstairs or Down, already judged. Taken by the slow descent into illness, or the surrender to old age, the crack of fragile bones against a swordstroke.  
This last half century—a blink of an eye, a long nap—it’s taken Tracy, and Shadwell, and Mr. and Mrs. Young, and the woman who used to run the cafe across the street from the bookshop, who would ask after Aziraphale’s “young man” and laugh at his sheepish smiles.  
There is a black-robed shadow behind them always. Their only fellow constant on earth. With Eve, after a long life. As the last animal boarded the Ark, as the floodwaters rose and ended so many lives, regardless of whether they deserved it. Atop a hill in Rome, a battlefield in Turkey, a hospital bed the nurses wouldn’t go near. As a warning meant for them, one Sunday morning, facing Heaven and Hell in each other’s stead.  
They cheated Death, once.  
They are still here, even if their friends are not.  
And they remember.

**Author's Note:**

> unfortunately-aziraphale on tumblr.


End file.
